I did not set out to write a book about the emasculation of America. I set out to understand what I was watching on YouTube.
For months I had been falling down the rabbit hole of videos documenting something that did not have a clean name yet but was impossible to miss once you started looking.
Men and women who could not stand each other. Not in the ordinary way people complain about the opposite sex, which is as old as anything. Something with a different quality to it: conclusions already reached before the argument started, and comment sections full of people who sounded like they were preparing for a war nobody had formally declared.
How do you know it was not fringe?
The numbers, which is the only reliable test available.
I watched enough of it to know it was not fringe. The view counts were too high. The audiences were too large and too young.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. Anything can be found on the internet, and the existence of a video proves nothing about how many people hold the view. What the numbers showed was not a corner of the platform. It was a substantial audience, skewing young, engaging heavily.
Something can be repellent and mainstream at the same time. Dismissing it as fringe because you find it unpleasant is the reliable way to be surprised later.
The book on this: The Emasculation of America is the argument that came out of months of watching something that did not have a clean name yet, and the blowback is expected.
Why did nobody have a name for it?
Because the existing frames did not fit and nobody had built a new one.
Most coverage of this material does one of two things. It treats the whole phenomenon as a moral panic, which does not explain the numbers. Or it treats the content as a plain description of reality, which requires accepting a set of claims that do not survive checking.
Neither of those was what I was looking at. What I was looking at was a large number of young people, of both sexes, arriving at a settled hostility toward the other one, apparently before having much personal evidence either way.
That is a thing that needs explaining instead of condemning or endorsing, and the explaining is what took a book.
What made it worth months of attention?
That it was happening at a scale I had not expected, to an age group with the most at stake.
Something was happening to the relationship between men and women in America at a scale that made it worth understanding instead of dismissing. Whatever you conclude about the content, a generation forming its expectations from this material will carry those expectations into every relationship it attempts.
That is not a culture war observation. It is a fairly boring point about where people get their models from when they do not have much direct experience yet.
Why write it if you know it will draw fire?
Because I have stopped optimising for that, and I can tell you exactly when.
I am getting older. I prefer my own company. And I stopped worrying about what people think of my conclusions around the same time I started being more interested in whether those conclusions were true.
Those two happened together and I do not think that is a coincidence. Worrying about reception and caring whether you are right are in tension, because the first requires anticipating an audience and the second requires ignoring one.
The blowback will come from people who have not read it carefully and from people who have read it carefully and do not like where the argument goes. Only the second group is worth answering, and in my experience they are the smaller one.
What is the actual position?
That something real is happening, that the available explanations do not account for it, and that the people most affected are the least equipped to notice it happening to them.
It is not a defense of the material I was watching. It is not an argument that one side is right. It is an attempt to explain a large observed phenomenon in terms that account for the numbers instead of in terms that make anybody comfortable.
What would I say to somebody who disagrees?
Check the view counts before deciding it is fringe. That is the first thing I did and it changed what I thought I was looking at.
Separate the content from the phenomenon. You can find the material contemptible and still need to explain why so many people are watching it.
Notice the ages. That is the part that made me take it seriously.
Read the argument before responding to the title. Most of the objections I expect are to a book I did not write.
Bring a better explanation. Mine may be wrong. What I have not found is an alternative that accounts for the same observations.
I went looking for an explanation of what was on my screen and did not find one, which is generally the point at which I end up writing something.
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